Has Amazon lost its way?

In my eyes, back in the early days of online shopping Amazon was Cinderella and Ebay, and the many others who have long-since left us, were her ugly stepsisters. For years I smugly admonished friends and relatives who used Ebay, it baffled me that they somehow expected to get what they paid for. In my eyes Amazon pushed for trust every step of the way whilst Ebay (and other sites) left sellers on a very loose leash, allowing all kinds of admonishable behaviour (and you never felt like the sites penalised people for their less-than-honourable selling practices).

Like I said Amazon was the diamond in the rough that was online shopping at the turn of the century. It was the Cinderella to a host of ugly step-sisters, but it turns out Amazon turned up at the ball in a mask and it’s becoming clear that she ain’t no Cinders.

I have been an Amazon customer since I was a student, about five or six years after they started trading (that’s more than a decade ago). Back then I bought books (it was all you really could buy from them in those days), but within a few years I was buying all kinds of things, mainly at Christmas, as Amazon started filling its warehouses with an increasingly broad stock range. Thanks to Amazon (and Amazon alone) I grew to love online shopping, I was sold.

I still love online shopping (though there are a number of things I would always rather buy in person) and Amazon’s digital services are fantastic (and don’t have the high-end price tag you pay to start using iTunes). However, I’m becoming aware of Amazon’s ethics (or lack thereof) more and more. From allegations of tax wrangling, to price wars, to their apparent reluctance to police their growing catalogue of ‘merchant’ stores, there are more and more factors that are putting me off Amazon.

According to ‘The Selling Family‘ this is one of the counterfeit Frozen sets

The ‘merchant’ stores in particular are a sticky issue for me, it’s getting harder to tell whether you’re buying from Amazon or from some third party merchant and the problem with third parties who can remain fairly anonymous, is that it’s easier for them to do less than honourable things. Recently there was a bit of controversy when Amazon’s top selling toy actually turned out to be a counterfeit Frozen play set (basically sub-standard tat with ‘Frozen’ written on it), you can find out more about it in John Baulch’s article here. Amazon has since ‘frozen’ third-party sales of Frozen toys but to be honest the damage is already done.

Put on top of this the fact that they price out basically any brick and mortar store, and the fact that even distributors are starting to have problems supplying the retail behemoth, and I’m starting to like them even less. Their only redeeming feature in my eyes is their digital content and the ease of use people can have in accessing the music, videos, and ebooks that they’ve purchased from Amazon.

Unlike purchases from itunes I’ve found Amazon’s attitude to digital content to be surprisingly relaxed; you buy it and then you decide how I want to use it. However, this doesn’t really undo the fact that they don’t pay taxes in the same way that traditional retailers do, nor does it counteract any of the issues addressed above, so despite the fact that I’ve still got a small portion of Amazon fandom I’ve got to admit to a growing dislike for the company.

Sorry for falling a little off the typical toys topic but after reading the articles I’ve linked to above I felt pretty miffed at a company who always used to have a lot of support from me. As I said, I was a full Amazon advocate, trying to persuade friends and relatives alike to buy from them, I don’t do that any more and that’s a sad thing to realise, it’s never good to see a company you trust and admire drop so drastically in your estimation.

Am I the only one with this peculiar sense of loss in regards to Amazon? Do you feel like you’re mourning what Amazon was/could have been or do you still hold them high in your estimations? As always any comments are more than welcome and thanks for stopping by, feel free to have a wander through my other posts, and you can catch me over on Twitter, Cheers, John